


Bitter Hunger

by Remph



Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher, Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25931167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Remph/pseuds/Remph
Summary: Life as a traveling hitman in the magical underbelly of America can be rough, but it's the only life Kiefer H. Unger knows. It's better when you have a friend to take on the world with, the kind he'd cross heaven and earth for. Of course that'd be put to the test.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

“So,” I said, picking the strings of meat out between my teeth, “that’s why Disney is an intellectually bankrupt edifice of a media company. The entire thing is made up of copyright lawyers, rentier bitches, and market execs that wouldn’t eat anything without getting it vetted by a focus team. They’re the objectively worst thing to happen to film ever since, geeze, I guess the Human Centipede? Nah, even that didn’t do anything outside of piss a lot of people off.”

“Are you going to help me bury the body or what?” My friend shoveled a clod of dirt over her shoulder, getting mud all over my jeans. I wrinkled my nose and brushed the flakes off, looking up from my daily nutritional supplement. It’s this long, tubular thing, with an appendage- look, it’s a human arm, okay? I can hardly dance around it when it’s sitting on my legs. It was toned and fit, a nice balance between muscle and fat. It was just a shame that it belonged to a serial defaulter. I’m a ghoul- Kiefer H. Unger, if you, the imaginary audience in my head are listening, one of the raggedy mooks any two bit vampire hires as muscle. My friend is Jennifer Ramirez, who also happens to be a ghoul and my travelling buddy. For five years, which is a long amount of time for us mendicant killers. 

“Lemme polish this arm off,” I decided, discarding any hints of good table manners to snarf down the limb. She was a fast eater- not like me. Every meal is something to savour, something to respect and worship. See, a lot of ghouls, when they feel peckish, they dig up a corpse and nosh on it and go about their lives- accountants, programmers, salesmen, whatever the fuck. The ghouls that tour the circuits, well, when they’re hungry they’ll eat whatever they want. The destitute, people who tick them off, and what have you. Me, I only eat my targets. Sure, I starve a lot, but that’s just respect. Something a lot of people don’t have anymore. 

In a minute, I’ve gnawed the arm to bone; my teeth are sharp and tough enough that they shatter the radius and ulna, but I don’t feel the bone splinters anymore. By the end, the arm’s just a hand ending in gristle and skin attached to the upper armbone by a strand of meat. I stood up from the fallen tree, sinking a bit in the autumn rot. We’re off the highway in some New England forest, pines stretching into the sky so thick that their branches block the sky. Poor ol’ Jen needs to muscle past the roots to dig the grave, which is totally not why I took my sweet time with my portion. 

There’s not much of a corpse left. Just some meat we couldn’t get to, cracked bones where we slurped out the marrow, and the carved-out remnants of a chest. It felt bad, sort of like how it felt when you threw a plastic bottle in the trash because you couldn’t be arsed to find a recycle bin.

Oh, well. The arm goes in with a wet splat, and I take up another shovel leaning against a tree as Jen drops a silver crucifix into the grave. We stand to attention, clap our hands, and bow, murmured prayers in Sumerian whispering through the trees. Amen, you were a hard man, you fought but you just weren’t tough enough. Rule of the jungle, and all that. Happy trails in Asphodel or Kur or wherever you want to end up. 

“Let’s hit up the beach again before we move,” Jen said as we climbed up the steep slope to the highway. “Would love to see the sea before- where are we going?”

“Think Iowa.”

“God, now we have to. I want to see something cool before sea to shining sea of fucking corn.” 

“Heh.” We have a nice van. It’s not a white creeper one, it’s this slate gray campervan that’s got a small kitchen, a microfrige, and soft corinthian leather upholstery along with an armored chassis and shielded lockboxes of… let’s say contraband. 

(It’s guns. America, baby!)

The two of us are in the van, peeling off our gloves and sinking into the rich leather seats. The engine starts and I’m clocking a good fifty miles on the highway as Jen contacted our current employer, some mafia loanshark that’s not cued in. Well, he knows something’s up with our associates, but he’s shut up about it ever since the Janitors happened to his boss.

“Mr. Dubois.” Her voice is a pleasure to listen to when she bothers. She’d have those noir singers begging for an audience; it’s rich and husky and low and dangerous. “He’s gone. Have the money at the drop. I trust you know the consequences if you don’t?”

I snickered. It’s the new millennium and we’re still acting like Scorese wiseguys. “Yes, yes.” A tinny voice that I really had to concentrate to hear under the engine. He sounds moderately freaked out, which is a pretty good feeling when half of the time, it’s your employers who moderately freak you out. Jan shushed me with an offhanded gesture, but she was smiling too. “Did he suffer?” God, but the mook was eager.

“I’m not in the business of gratuity, Mr. Dubois, but take it as an article of faith that he was screaming when we did the job.” 

“Did the job,” I whisper at her in a goombah impression. 

“Shut up,” she hissed at me with a hand covering the phone, but I knew she was laughing where it counted. In her heart. Mr. Dubois tried to say something, but Jan steamrolled over him. “That will be all, Mr. Dubois. It’s been a pleasure working for you. Don’t be afraid to… call again.” Call ends. Scene wrap. 

“You know you can always start a podcast and rake in the donation money,” I mentioned offhand. “Dudes with no life would send you thousands for you to verbally humiliate them on air.” 

“I think that’s a hell in some religion or the other,” Jen observed. “Anyway, Kief, you have a college degree. Why don’t you get gainfully employed, instead of bumming around America with a bad influence?”

“Personally, I think I’m the bad influence. I’ve already gotten you to hate Captain America.”

“Rest assured that I have hated him ever since I watched Avengers.” 

“But you still like Black Widow. Work on it, Jen. Ya gotta hate the whole bunch. It’ll give you strength.” 

We shared a laugh in the car, windows down and the crisp, pine scented air of Stephen King’s haunts filling the cabin. 

(Still mad I never got to shoot It.)

Her phone lit up and vibrated, and she swore as she fumbled with the screen. It didn’t seem to make her happy. She groaned and shut it off and slumped against the chair in a deep sulk. “Family?” I guessed.

“Yeah,” she sighed, “keep pressuring me to go down to the Yutacan and sign up as a permanent soldier for the V’s. God, but fuck that. I keep telling them I make good money here, most of my connections are here, but they just won’t listen.” 

Her family was nobility, as far as the ghouls were concerned. The Lachaise family weren’t shit to the ghouls living out of the cave they called Xibalba. Even the Red King walked on tiptoes around the Hun-Came and Vucub-Came. I don’t know if they really were the Mayan lords of death, or if it was just an internal mythology, but damn, if it wasn’t a good one. Either case… “so fuck’em,” I suggested. “You’re still sending the money back, you got a career going, flip them off and say if they keep on doing this, you’ll take the paycheck of some Freeholder. I heard that Marcone is always up for some more muscle, and you’re more good looking than half the mooks he probably has.” 

“Aw,” she chuckled in a sad sort of way. “You’re sweet. But they’re still family, no? Even if they drive me nuts sometime.”

“Wouldn’t know the feeling,” And the more Jen talked about her clan, the less I wanted one. Sure, having guys that could back you up was a good feeling, which was why I teamed up with Jen in the first place. But Xibalba just sounded cloying and suffocating. Getting ordered around by century old monsters who’d never stepped in a film theater once in their lives didn’t sound fun at all. 

“Whatever, mutt,” she said without rancor.

“Arf arf arf.” I let the wind ruffle my hair. We were a long way from most habitation, cruising around in the backwoods of Maine. Closest human habitation was this little nowhere town a hundred miles away from where we were now. So, when the world was suddenly lit in fire and flame, shrapnel cutting through our flesh, nobody heard it. Nobody saw it. They would only notice something was up when they saw the trail of smoke ambling up to the clouds on seven AM morning news. 

Dying hurt.


	2. Chapter 2

There’s a lot of wiggle room when you talk about dying. Heart’s stopped, brain dead, or whatever. Even humans have a lot of room to work with to fuck off out of the vale of the dead, and ghouls are even tougher than that. Not like vamps- Red Court, White Court, or Black Court. Black Court’s already dead, and they just animate whatever scraps of flesh they have left and go down to the graveyard like it’s their Saturday shopping to scrape together some flesh. White Courts are the wusses of vampires, and they just heal better than humans. Red Court comes closest- drawing masses of squirming flesh from some hell-dimension and shaping them into their bodies.

Us ghouls? Well, the closest thing I can say is that we just like living too much to bite it. I woke up ten pounds thinner and to a bitter hunger gnawing at my gut the next morning, when the first rays of the sun stabbed into my eyelids. Autocannibalism. Whenever a ghoul gets really hurt, the last thing they nosh down on is their own flesh and bone, years of stocked up fat and muscle gone in an instant to heal some sucking chest wound. 

Saliva dripped from my mouth, pooling on the ashes of my shirt. It felt like there was a rabid wolverine in my gut trying to eat its way out. The protoplasmic spear-blood at my spine’s seat was roiling, twitching like a living being as if it wanted to dig itself out like an octopus and eat. The only thing on my mind was to eat something- could be a squirrel, it could be my own arm, but I had to fill my stomach with anything. 

Oh, god. Did I eat Jen? The thought flashed in my brain like red lightning between clouds of groggy early morning confusion. Where was she? “Jen?” I called, repeating her name as I swiveled my neck to survey my burning surroundings. Smoke rose from the hood, and tha dash was hot to the touch. The windows behind me were shattered, and the entire car was tipped on its side. She wasn’t at the shotgun seat, and that sight sent a crack through my mind. 

My pulse beat a mile a minute. Cold sweat pooled in the small of my back and there was a memory of blood on my lips. “No,” I said out loud, at first shaky and tremorous. “No,” I said again, this time more confident. “I couldn’t have eaten her,” I reasoned. “First of all, there’s no body, or remnants of one.” And it was true. If I had overpowered her somehow- which was also impossible, because sleeping or not Jen could beat me with both arms tied- then I would have left blood or clothes remaining. Since there was none, I did not kill her. QED.

I felt a little better, but that’s just a drop in the ocean. I gave myself another minute to rest in the seat before I ripped off the remnants of my shirt and crawled out of the burning wreck. Ugh. A couple hundred thousand dollars and more than one favor, up in smoke. What a fuckin’ waste. 

Here’s what I salvaged: the iron mini-fridge, containing roughly a week’s worth of emergency rations. The little lockbox filled with articles of faith me and Jen gave to our targets when they went to the afterlife. I used silver obels minted from Greece, she used crucifixes. It also had a backup of my fake ID- Kenneth Underhill, who exists solely as a birth certificate and a driver’s license. And Jen’s, but that’s not important anymore. There were some other miscellaneous things, too. Garlic cloves. Jen’s iron and silver knuckle duster with crosses on each knuckle. This and that. And a change of clothes, luckily for me. 

The guns were locked up in compartments under the couch on the side of the van. That’s where something hit it and exploded, so most of them are toast. Who’d bring an RPG to kill two wandering ghouls? Sure, we made enemies. Lots of them, in fact, but none of them had the pull for rocket launchers in the States. 

It had to be something about Xibalba, I decided as I carefully laid out what I could salvage. Only gun left working was this old bolt rifle- a Mosin, I recalled. Ol’ Dragunov gave me hell when I accidentally called it a Winchester in front of her. Three clips, and a cello bag to pack it in. Wouldn’t be hard, I considered as I chewed on the frozen, burnt, and otherwise abused flesh from the freezer. “They only took Jen, not me,” I said out loud, ordering my thoughts as I ate, nibbling bites that turned into great savaging chomps. “So it’s a family thing. Ugh. Family. 

“What’s my plan now?” Eat some more. Feel more alive. “I need to get someone to find her. So, a wizard.” Wait. “No, I need to get the money from Dubois. Then, I get a wizard- no, shit. I get a car. Then I get the wizard.” 

Okay. This is workable. I can do this, I thought to myself as I sat in front of the car I shared good times and bad times with Jen with, watching it burn. I can do this.

(I can do this.)

Hitchhiking’s a dead transportation method. Ever since the 90’s ended, everybody looks askance at a guy at the turnpike with a thumb raised high. I blame it on movies. The rash of films about the hitchhiker that turns out to be a murderer thoroughly poisoned it for the general public.I mean, sure, I’m a murderer, but I’m not a serial one. 

I’ve been standing at the side of the highway for hours, the cello case that contained the cello and the mosin strapped to my back with a fresh shirt and jacket on me. And I’m an attractively disheveled white dude too. 

The law of averages is on my side. Eventually, a beaten up Volvo sedan pulls over, window rolled down. “Need a ride?” Driver’s an older man, gray in his hair. Probably an accountant or some other white collar work at some dead end job.

“Yessir.” Never hurt to be polite.

“Where to?” He popped the shotgun door open, and I clambered in, maneuvering the cello bag to the backseat. 

“Where you headed, sir? Drop me off at the first stop with a bus station.” He smelled like, well, food. And I was still starving. If I stayed in the car for a long time, I’d have darkened my eyes and sprang for the throat. That’s a bad thing, both because it’d draw attention, and morally. When somebody helps you, you don’t repay them by killing them. Mostly. 

“You got it, kid.” Kid. Heh. That’s me. Kid Hunger, and his sidekick slash boss the Death Bat(woman). “You hungry? Cause I can hear your stomach from out of state.”

Shit. “I’m doing a diet plan,” I lied out my teeth.” “It’s been hittin’ me hard, but it’s working. I was basically the Michillin Man in college.” Now that food’s on the conversation, a wave of hunger hit me like a baseball bat to the nose in the hands of a bruiser. Fuck, he’s looking more and more palatable. Meat and fat all wrapped up in this tobacco aged bag of skin. Like a sausage with a Cuban finish. What the hell am I on about?

“Huh.” He grunted and scratched his cheek. “I’ll take your word for it. My daughters at Case Western, herself.”

“Gotta be rough on the wallet.” 

“Tell me about it.” Guy sneaked a look at me. “What major were you in, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Comparative mythology,” I said. “Bit of a useless major, wasn’t it? I wrote a paper and all, but it never got much traction. Nobody except for bored fantasy writers wants to know about Bronze Age middle eastern underworld beliefs.” He nodded, and there wasn’t anything left to say. And that was good, otherwise I’d go nuts trying to stop myself from going to the throat. Like a tootsie roll. Or whatever. He drove me all the way to the Darry stop, a little tumor of truck stops, fast food restaurants, and a bus station. America in one place, folks. I thanked him and got off, stretching my legs in the New England chill. Before he drove off, however, he turned to me.

“What was the paper?”

“Huh?”

“The paper,” he elaborated. “What was its name?”

Wow. Think on that. Crap I wrote from years ago coming back today. “The Gallu and Its Lineage,” I said. “It’s pretty dull stuff, so pirate it, yeah? The websites don’t pay me, so get it on libgen. Also, happy travels.” I rattled the little image of the saint hanging off the mirror. He smiled back and sped off. 

See, Dragunov? I know self restraint. Just because you’re a wrinkled old prune who hasn’t laughed since the Great Patriotic War doesn't mean I’m a feckless layabout who should have been born a Raith. Not a lot to tell about the bus ride. It was on an old and creaking bus with threadbare seats, travelling all the way to Redhorn, a marginally larger town along the coast. That's where the dead drop was, at a mob owned restaurant with lockers at the back side.

The ride was bumpy and the bus was in shit condition. Now I really missed my van, so all I really wanted was to get the money- a good couple grand, and rent a car. Not from a regular agency, of course. There were people in the know that ran pit stops all over America, and they’d sell you a junker for cheap, an old shitbucket that had three or four hundred miles left in the tank before it died.

The restaurant was a sort of a bar, sort of an actual restaurant, a middle income sort of place that wasn’t quite a chain but wasn’t a proper restaurant either. There were lockers in the back of the restaurant, three obviously unused things with built in locks on them. There were spots of rust on their gray-green metal exterior, and covered in old stickers of every kind. I found the one that’s supposed to contain the manila folder with the pay and unlocked it.

I blinked. Then I closed my eyes and opened them again, waiting for whatever delusion that squatted on my brain to sink away in the midday sun. Unfortunately, it was not, in fact, an illusion. I ran a hand all over the interior. No dice. Maybe it’s behind the lockers? Still no dice.

I need to make a call.


	3. Chpater 3

The first rule of hunting is that you never let your prey know you’re coming. So of course, I didn’t call Dubois at the restaurant in Redhorn. I brought another bus ticket- down to my last twenty bucks- and went down to a suburb of Boston, a little section of the town where there was rowhouses on rowhouses. Dubois pretended to be a legit tax agency, and I guess he did pretty well for himself because his office took up three out of four floors of a brownstone building. There was a rich aroma of roasting coffee from the ground floor. But under that, there was a scent of blood. Old and long cold, sure, but blood anyway, and cordite. 

This had to be the place, I decided from my perch at the roof of the building next to Dubois and Co, Tax Attorneys at Law. The cello bag was stashed away in some stinking alley a good distance from here, and the only things I had in my pocket were the knuckle dusters. Not that I needed them to deal with a human, but just in case Dubois had some shit tucked up his sleeve. 

Jen had dug something up on our employers, which wasn’t exactly common practice. A lot of ghouls just wanted a name, a date, and a sack of money, and if they got betrayed, well, that’s just how it goes, baby. Not Jen, though. She was meticulous. She planned everything out, she had dirt on our employers in case we got stabbed in the back, and most importantly, she knew where our employers were.

Not like me. I would have never thought about things like that. Jen called me a weird little kill-goblin that only lived to hunt things, and she’s right. Anyway, that’s not much of an insult. Goblins are pretty badass. I was better at her at marksmanship and sneaking around than her, though, but she took me apart like spam can ammo when we sparred, so everything was even in the end.

The sun was low in the sky, painting the far horizon blood reds and bleeding orange. The five pm commuters had already left. I hope Dubois wasn’t one of them. I could have tried it earlier, but I don’t want people on the scene if I decided to pop his head open like a bottle of coke. 

I flipped a phone open, dialing the number Jen gave me when we took the job. I think the man in the tweed jacket sitting in front of the third floor window is Dubois. Well, more hope, if we’re being honest here. When the number goes through, I see the man at the desk raise a phone to his ear..

Excellent.

“Hello, Mr. Dubois,” I snarled. I can hear him in two places- a sharp breath over the speakers and whispering through the windows. “Where’s my fucking money?” 

I got no class.

“W-what are you talking about?” 

“You know what, I know what. Let’s skip the bullshit. Where’s my fucking money?” 

“The deal’s gone through, Kid Hunger.” My pseudonym. “Cairo called and she said that she got the money.” Cairo was Jen’s. All ghouls had one. 

“Really. Then why isn’t it in my pocket?” 

I could see him shrug through the window. “I don’t know. Listen, we can have a sit down over this, okay? I feel for you, but the line isn’t secure. Let’s go get a cup of coffee and we can-”

“No need.” I backed up a couple of steps, measuring the distance.

“Huh?” A surgical mask goes over my face. Hiding your identity is very important, but I lost our custom masks in the fire. I bought a pack from a CVS along the way.

“Get away from the window.” I’m off running now, a couple of strides that ended in a leap off the lip of the roof, half a swan dive and half a drop kick into the window. It broke, shattered into shards as Dubois gave a yelp and rolled to one side as I landed on the floor with a thump. “Hello, Dubois. Let’s talk.” 

I cracked my knuckles. He drew a gun. 

On the balance, I had the better deal. 

Spear-bloods aren’t the fastest of most ghouls. That honor belongs to the bullet-bloods, but we’re still faster than a human could pull a trigger. Especially if we’re only separated by a couple of feet, and if Dubois hadn’t even cleared the gun out of his jacket when I darted forward and grabbed the gun and wrenched it out of his grip. It wasn’t a strong one- he was shaking and trembling. “Y-your eyes. It’s-” he was babbling. God, this is pathetic. No spine on these mobsters. 

“Shut it.” Ghouls had a bunch of atavistic responses. Biggest one was that our sclera turned black and irises red when they got worked up. My heart beat a little steady thump thump thump. I wasn’t really worked up, but I was getting ready to go into a higher gear. “So. Let’s talk about Cairo. No, wait. Where’s the guards?”

Speak and they will arrive. There were footsteps at the door, and soon there was somebody banging on the door. “Boss? Boss!” 

“Okay,” I said, cocking the gun, a snub nosed revolver. “Tell them to go away.” Guns are threatening things. Every inch of them is built to kill something, and when you’re staring down the barrel of one you tend to rethink your life real quick. “No buts. Do it.”

Dubois nodded. Was he crying? God. “You can leave! I just had an accident.”

The voice outside paused. “Are you sure?”

“Certain! Go on, you have work to do.” He sighed, smoothing his little tie with a hand, a little ritual to calm his nerves. “Now, what do you want?” He fixed me with a querulous stare that lost any gimlet qualities it might have had over the years. Dubois tottered like an old man as he sunk into the rich green leather chair at the desk. 

“Well, mister, I woke up this morning after somebody with an RPG attacked me and abducted my partner, and then I found out that the dead drop had already been pilfered. Now you’re here, telling me that Cairo called you, so I’m feeling something’s a little bit fucked here. Following me?” 

“Maybe she left,” Dubois coughed. “Wandering hitmen don’t… they have trust issues, after all.”

“Nah, not us. Explain, shitbird.”

He stared at me. “I told you,” he enunciated, “I don’t know anything. I feel for you, I really do, but sometimes-” 

Being a thug is low class, boorish, and all in all kinda fun. I pointed the revolver at him, across the desk, and returned the stare. “Keep on thinking,” I advised him. “Who’s backing you?” It was a really, really wild guess. Someone had to pull the hit, so I might as well ask everyone and see what shaked out. 

So when Dubois flattened out his expression into a blank waxen mask and pressed something under his desk, I was too busy being shocked to react to the left wall exploding in a spray of plaster and wood. Something with talons wrapped around my head and chucked me at the opposite wall at speeds that would have snapped a human neck.

The second rule of hunting is that if you find yourself in this position, it’s safe to say you fucked up.


	4. Chapter 4

I coughed up sawdust and flakes of plaster, a death grip on the revolver. Whoever threw me was strong, stronger than a human. The gun gleams in the flickering fluorescent light, barrel trained on the ugly, batlike thing squatting at the hole in the opposite wall. There was another office behind it, an empty cubicle farm that Dubois slowly edged into as I rose into a marksman’s stance. 

A Red Court vamp. They’re ugly motherfuckers, but I guess maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. “I never thought you’d had the balls to come here,” it chuckled wetly, gurgling deep in its throat. “Go back to the rot, ghoul. It’s where you belong.” It was all corded muscle and veiny membranes, narcotic saliva dripping from its mouth, two beady red eyes staring into my own pools of black and red. 

“You’re a chatty motherfucker,” I told it, and shot it at center mass. It screeched and half charged, half flew at me, spattering a trail of blood underneath it, scrabbling with nails that left sharp rents on the floorboards. The office is ten paces wide, and that’s still enough time for my training and muscle memory to kick in. The gun snapped to a new target- the biggest on the vampire- it’s open, snarling maw.

A second gunshot rings out in the office building. I hear people running outside. The police will probably be called in soon, a distant part of my mind notes. I should probably affect an exit. Seconds after the thought crosses my mind, the vampire made that decision for me. It tackled me like a football pro, driving it’s full weight into my chest like a charging train. One wall shatters, then two, then three, then the outer wall as the tiled ceiling gives way to the twilight sky as we fall down into the cold concrete. 

It hurts. Goddamnit, it hurts. The vampire’s pretty heavy and it just drove me into solid rock. I coughed, and there was blood in it. Something cracked- I think it was a floating rib, or maybe a vertebrae. It’s got me in a mount position, a perfect opportunity to drive it’s monstrous fists and talons into my face and splatter my brain all over the concrete.. 

Well. I’m a monster too. 

There’s sloppy pauses in the vampire’s blows, which makes me think he’s not got much experience at all. If he did, he should have noticed how my abdomen twitched and gotten off the mount. 

It erupted out, six tentacles like long leeches pushing out of my lower back and tearing holes in my shirt. I rise a good six, seven feet before momentum fails me, gravity not seeming to matter for one second. The vampire screeched as the force bucks it off of me, gliding to the ground at the same time I land in a squat.

“Talk,” I said, gun still in my hand. 

“Fuck you, maggot,” it snarled past a bleeding tongue. We dart in again, a deadly dance of talons and writhing muscle. The vampire has all the benefits of its kind. It is stronger than me, faster than me, and has savaging claws and fangs with muscles more like armor plates. But, it’s sloppy. It’s probably only pushed around humans that were shitting themselves in terror rather than an actual opponent. 

It rushed forward, with no technique in footwork or it’s talon-play. It didn’t even see it when my tentacles slammed into its side and sent it flying into a metal dumpster.

Metal screeched in the small courtyard turned freakshow fight cage. It bent under the vampire’s weight, and I took the chance to empty the last four shots in the revolver into the sprawled vampire. That wakes it up. I slip on the iron and silver knuckle duster as it lopes at me, slower this time, more careful. This time, I charge in, wringing every ounce of speed I can out of my muscles. The knuckle dusters connect with the vamp’s jaw. There’s angry red welts where I struck, not because of how hard the blow was.

Lucky us. We might be weaker than most nasties, but we also don’t have their weaknesses. Garlic? We can’t eat it, but it doesn’t do shit for us. Crosses? Hey, if you’re a Christian, bring it and give some vampire a surprise. I’m not Christian- I don’t even believe in anything, but I know Jen does. The crosses might not have worked as much as it would in her hands, but it’s still enough for a solid edge on my side.

The vampire recoils, hissing and sputtering in pain. Another solid hit. This time it's flesh steamed from the impact, pain and desperation fueling wild, desperate swipes. I’m bleeding, I noticed, as I drive the vampire to the ground, mauling it with the silver and iron in my right hand. There’s lines dripping blood all along my arms and their talons opened my cheek, exposing my pearly whites to the air. Superficial injuries. They’re only dangerous in that I could bleed out if I’m not careful.

Catharsis might be an unhealthy coping habit, but we can’t all take a month long retreat into the wilderness. I’ve spent an entire day jetting around Maine on shitty busses, I just got cheated out of my payday, and my employer blew up my home on wheels and abducted my friend of five plus years for some goddamn reason. 

I worked it’s skill over, driving silver into its forehead, again and again and again until I heard a crack of bone. Then I hit the vampire a couple more times for good measure. “Feel like talking?”

“She’s gone already,” it snarled back. “You’ll never find her. Keep pushing and you’ll-”

“Threats only work if you’re the one doing the hurting.” The next blow puts out an eye. Not on purpose, but eyes are always squishy things. They can pop pretty easily, especially if you jab one of the protrusions of a knuckle duster right into them. “Talk.” 

“Go fuck yourself, ghoul. You’re a worm eating rot, and you’ll never be anything more than that. You should be fucking honored that we give you the scraps off our plate. Your little friend’s probably high off the Kiss already.”

How dare they. “How dare you,” I said out loud, something dull and flat in my voice. I hit it again, this time, I think I see viscera in the crack. “How dare you.” Again. The silver touches the brain, and-

“Freeze! Put your hands in the air! Police!” 

Goddamnit.

I slowly turned behind me. There was a young guy in a police uniform standing at the lip of the alley that led into the courtyard I was in, pointing a shaking gun at me. “Put your hands in the air! Do it!” 

I looked at the vamp. No, I decided, I probably couldn’t carry it with me. It’s half dead, either way. Fine. Before the cop can say another word, I leap off of the soon to be corpse, ten, twenty feet off the ground as I grab onto an exposed water-pipe and clambered onto a roof, sprinting away from the scene.


End file.
